Flibitz is Very Close to Release

Bugs are getting fixed, the iOS release is getting closer, and this blog post is being written in passive voice because my college English professors can’t tell me what to do anymore.

I apologize for being so terribly inconsistent about keeping up with this blog. Technically, I suppose I have been consistent in my inconsistency, so that’s something…I guess?

I don’t have a lot of time to go into detail about everything that has been happening, but here is the basic sequence of it:

A couple of weeks ago, Flibitz was finished. We submitted the game to Apple, and it was promptly approved for App Store release.

We celebrated with waffles and the most horrible-looking/wonderful-tasting hash-browns in the galaxy. Yes, our celebration was at Waffle House because of reasons.

After that, I was tired and feeling very cooped up from spending endless hours in my home office, so I took my two sons camping. Camping was even more wonderful than Waffle House. It turns out that, outside, there are trees and things. Who knew? Also I made some excellent Greek Coffee on the camp store, and got reacquainted with the concept of breakfast dessert. And this camping trip had zero frog attacks, which, if my math is correct, is an improvement of infinity percent compared to last year’s trip.

Then I came home and, to my surprise, Flibitz was no longer done. Due to a bug in Unity3d, the game engine that we use, none of the music was playing on iOS 10 for certain models of iPads. I personally wrote and recorded about ten minutes of music for this game, so having it no longer working made the Flibitz very sad.

The Flibitz would, however, like me to point out that they think Unity is an amazing engine and that they love it very much. It’s just that in this particular situation, not having the music in the game was kind of a deal-breaker, so our previously approved build is headed for the great hard drive in the sky, and I spent the weekend fixing things and preparing to resubmit. (How’s that for a run-on sentence?)

The workaround for the audio issue turned out not to be such a big deal. I just changed some import settings to use an approach that is not affected by this particular bug. The new way is not quite as efficient on memory, but my initial tests indicate that it still performs well. After upgrading to the newest version of Unity, I also ran into some issues with a plugin that we’re using. It took some time to get that sorted out, but things are looking up.

I’m going to do some more testing and profiling tomorrow, but at the risk of jinxing it, I’ll say that we’re in good shape. We don’t have an official release date to announce yet, but I think it’s safe to say we’re looking at weeks, not months.

So the moral of the story is…camping breaks software, even if it’s frog-attack-free camping.